SEO is a beast, just like website marketing, or any marketing for that matter. It does appear you are on the correct track anyhow, but i can tell you as an experienced SEO tech, there is more to it than meets the eye, specifically when working with any dynamic website. SEO was designed and developed for static sites, there are some success stories with dynamic sites but there is a lot of work involved in getting a dynamic site optimized. then when you are working with cached and gzipped environments, see more the robots DO NOT Like that at all, i can assure you.

I can tell you 'a' key to optimization --> tons of relevant text, dont worry about being pretty, dont worry about the format, aesthetics have no bearing on SEO, and so many overload a website with graphics, the larger part of the site is one huge image, and the textual content is minimal. keep the images, videos, audios to a minimum, draft articles, that are clear and concise, share those articles across the www, there are many sites that take article submission, and the object is to provide others with relevant content, while providing you with a link back from whomever uses that article.

keep your data fresh on your site, stale data, and i mean 2-3 days old, is just that, stale data, the bots dont like it, and you will see a decrease in PR, if that even matters.

well enough of my babbling.

Regards,
DosDawg